Twitter Is Killing Twitter to Save Twitter

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Twitter isn’t about a 140-character limit. It’s not about a timeline. It’s not about your joke going viral, or getting Justin Bieber to follow you by any means necessary. It’s about a single question, the one you see when you first load twitter.com: “What’s happening?”

Yet Twitter, as it has existed until now, has done a terrible job of both asking and answering that most central question. And so the company is, effectively, trying again. Its newly-revealed Project Lightning, BuzzFeed reports, will be the core feature of Twitter going forward: a button in the living center of its mobile app’s menu bar, dedicated to providing useful information in real time. Twitter’s editorial team (made of real, live humans) will define the big stories of the day, and will package tweets, images, and video to explain what’s going on. Those packages will be the primary unit of Twitter, and will be embeddable all over the Internet.

If Twitter does this right, Lightning will make Twitter more accessible, simpler, and friendlier. And it’ll work precisely because it dispenses with everything we currently know about Twitter.

Way back in 2006, Twitter started as a way for Jack Dorsey and his co-founders to feel a little more connected and a little less alone. They were sharing status updates, like AIM Away Messages, and telling each other what they were up to. Never forget that Dorsey, now interim CEO, loves—like, loves—tweeting about what a beautiful morning it is.

As it grew, though, Twitter became less about the mundanities of our lives and more about watching the world change together. About why a plane landed in the Hudson river, and who was going to win a wild World Cup final. Twitter became about all of us, together, right now. It has played a key role in democratic uprisings and enacting social change, and has made everything from Kim Kardashian to the Arab Spring into global experiences.

1/3 You know what sucks about Twitter? People like me, who just talk and talk and talk without ever saying anything of value about…

Those are great things, but they don’t represent the day-to-day Twitter that exists when the world isn’t pulsing with imminent change. That Twitter has been co-opted by people who saw a global billboard service rather than a messaging tool. It is an inscrutable mix of breaking news, valuable commentary, horrible trolling, and brands saying bae to get you to eat chicken nuggets. The reward—the retweets, the favs, the Brand Activation Opportunities—were so enticing, and the penalties—the bad jokes that ended careers, the DM fails that killed campaigns—were so scary, that that everyone on Twitter just tried too hard to be cool. Twitter became a victim of what you could call the Reputation Economy.

Twitter became a victim of the Reputation Economy.

In the Reputation Economy, speed, bloviation, and #engagement are prized far above the actual dissemination of useful information. We tweet every morsel of some breaking news story whether we know anything about it or not, aware that the stream moves too fast to really come back to haunt us (except when it does). We take shots at anyone we can, just to get noticed. We become the most insidery version of ourselves, making dumb jokes with the person in the cubicle next to us just to feel cool in the eyes of a few thousand followers. We troll, because it’s so removed and so easy to screw with people on the Internet. Or we withdraw, torn to bits by the mess that is anyone with a keyboard and a masked IP address.

2/3 anything at all. Or worse, I pretend to have opinions about things I don’t know anything about, and for some reason that just gets….

Sure, yes, everyone’s Twitter is different—that’s one of the service’s best aspects, that you can follow anyone you want and see whatever you want. Unfortunately, this only works if everyone on Twitter isn’t terrible most of the time. They are. You are. I are.

There’s a solution to this, and Twitter may have, at long last, figured it out: shut us all up when we’re not saying something of consequence.

What Project Lightning represents, more than anything, is the long-overdue death of the Twitter timeline. (Or its demotion, at the very least, in the hope it’ll quietly resign.) With this change, Twitter doesn’t have to look like an endlessly flowing, context-free stream of tweets; instead, you can see a hand-curated set of tweets, links, images, and videos related to what’s happening right now. You see one at a time, swiping through them until you get to the end. And there’s an end! If you want to follow reporters during a national news story but not while they natter on about their facial hair and email inboxes, you can—or at least, Twitter is saying you’ll be able to. (The service isn’t yet live, and the Discover Tab was supposed to be great, too.) If you just want to know about the World Cup, and don’t care much where it comes from, Lightning—or whatever it ends up being called—does that too.

In short, this effort puts a stake through the idea that Twitter is a social network. It’s not. It never should have tried to be. It’s not about people, jokes, and #brands. It’s about information, about news and pictures and stories.

The big question for Twitter is whether it can actually pull this off. It’s been trying to do this kind of curation forever. There’s Trending Topics, the now-dead Discover tab, and the new Recaps feature that shows you what you missed since you last opened the app. These features have always been off to the side, though, or buried on some third tab.

Twitter figured out the timeline is the problem.

Everything else has always been subordinate to “the stream.” And the stream is overwhelming, alienating, and exhausting. Looking for useful information in a full timeline is like standing in Grand Central station trying to hear a butterfly—and that’s when there’s no sporting event / awards show / new Taylor Swift video / international crisis being blabbed about.

Now, Twitter has so many ways to figure out what you might want to see. It’s hiring a team of editors; it’s able to use your location or even your browser history to figure out what you might want to see; and it has the incredible advantage of being the place where the world already turns to share information.

3/3 lumped into a stream that moves too fast to show you the things that actually matter. And there are so many things here that matter.

So it’s telling that Lightning will occupy the center spot in Twitter’s UI, and that these curated streams will be embeddable across apps and the web. Soon, this is going to be the default Twitter experience. When you’re not logged in, you won’t be dropped into some pre-populated timeline filled with Neil Patrick Harris and The New York Times.

Twitter will show you, maybe for the first time ever, what’s happening.